This challenge was intended primarily as a horrible, unfair trap for those inclined to approach problems by throwing conventional ML algorithms at relevant datasets without doing manual data exploration.
I kinda noticed that when I tried to apply a Random Forest which, in my experience, almost no one tries to counter in their toy problems and encountered some really bad results (I couldn’t even get enough mana if tried to go with its predictions no matter how I handled the data).
Soooo I made a simple feed-forward NN and returned home with ~20 gold according to the interactive web shopping. Using suspiciously powerful black boxes in problems obviously asking you to stop and think is also horrible and unfair, yet here I am.
To be honest, I did explore the data, making a correlation matrix between one-hot-encoded columns and readings/mana, and noticed some of the patterns you describe in the post. But they seemed complex, and I was sleepy, and so I went ahead and hammered in some nails with a microscope.
Very cool challenge idea overall, I greatly enjoyed doing it wrong. Thank you for sharing this on ACX. I’m a long-time lurker on LW, but this made me sign up.
I kinda noticed that when I tried to apply a Random Forest which, in my experience, almost no one tries to counter in their toy problems and encountered some really bad results (I couldn’t even get enough mana if tried to go with its predictions no matter how I handled the data).
Soooo I made a simple feed-forward NN and returned home with ~20 gold according to the interactive web shopping. Using suspiciously powerful black boxes in problems obviously asking you to stop and think is also horrible and unfair, yet here I am.
To be honest, I did explore the data, making a correlation matrix between one-hot-encoded columns and readings/mana, and noticed some of the patterns you describe in the post. But they seemed complex, and I was sleepy, and so I went ahead and hammered in some nails with a microscope.
Very cool challenge idea overall, I greatly enjoyed doing it wrong. Thank you for sharing this on ACX. I’m a long-time lurker on LW, but this made me sign up.